A gospel of contemplation: Homily for Friday, February 2, 2024

Today, I would suggest that the gospel is the gospel of contemplation. We encounter two people in their lives who are at a stage and time in their life where activity takes the back seat, where they, in fact, are in the temple day and night praying.

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In the gospel, Simeon and Anna find their time of prayer and contemplation fulfilled in its person: an encounter with the Lord Jesus himself.

A gospel of contemplation

I’ve often thought that if you were going to evaluate life, contemplation or the contemplative vocation is one of the more interesting. Because in many ways, in our American culture in particular or our Western world where productivity is kind of the value, the contemplative life on the surface doesn’t seem to produce much tangible.

People spend their time in the presence of God. They’re not out engaged in specific ministry, so to speak. They’re not feeding the poor. They’re not teaching. They’re not wandering around trying to help people who are in desperate or difficult circumstances. They pray.

I think, for example, of the Carthusian monastery in Vermont, my home state of Vermont. They never leave. I learned when one got sick, anytime there is the exceptional circumstance where they need to go outside of the monastery, they travel in pairs. And so I was able to get to know one because the superior of the Carthusians had become quite sick with heart trouble.

I learned they get a day and a half for visitors a year, which they can take all at once, the day and a half, which means the people who want to visit them come and stay at a guest house and can visit with them. Or they can take it in two halves, three quarters of a day, twice a year. But that’s it.

We could look at their life and say, well, you know, if God would not be real, then this is real faith. This is real trust. And this is what I think Simeon and Anna were doing in the gospel. They had gotten to a stage in their life where their active days, in many respects, had come to an end.

What they were doing was devoting their lives in complete totality to their relationship with God. And indeed, they came to know God. Sometimes I think in our life, we can see the goal of the Christian life is to be busy. You know, it’s like that, I’ve seen it as a bumper sticker, but I’ve been probably in other contexts too. Jesus is coming, look busy.

But that’s not the point of our life. The point of our life is a relationship. When you ask Jesus, what are we supposed to do? He really says two things. There’s two rules. There’s the most important rule, which is to love God. And then there’s the love of neighbor. But it isn’t about success.

If we look at people who have been deeply dedicated to serving the poor or to doing love of neighbor, they didn’t eliminate the problem of poverty. If one is protesting, I think rightly, the excess of war and violence in our world, we haven’t eliminated it, even despite tremendous efforts by people of goodwill who believe deeply.

But what we have done is we’ve seen raised up people who come to know and love God so much that they are examples to us of holiness. If we were to look at the eastern side of church, so there is the west, which would be Europe and North America, in many respects Africa and Central America and South America, there’s a certain kind of pride of place that we provide with activity.

But if we were to look at the eastern side of our church, Asia, for example, and other countries, India, China, what we would see is that there’s a preference for entering into the mystery. In the west, we see mysteries as something to be solved. In the east, mysteries are something to be entered into.

If there’s a reason why I think contemplative prayer is difficult, it is because when we enter truly into contemplative prayer, we are standing naked before our God. There’s no hiding, because there’s nothing to do. It’s not about giving God a lot of words or speaking a lot of things or so forth. It’s about waiting for God to do what God has longed to do in our lives every single day of our lives.

contemplation — Photo by Irina Demyanovskikh on Pexels.com

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